Our Discovery Platform: Enabling a New Drug Modality

Leveraging Breakthrough Discoveries in Immunology

From Ruslan Medzhitov's discovery of toll-like receptors (TLRs) as the key immune system receptors that detect infection, which spawned the field of innate immunity, to Dan Littman's efforts to identify and clone CD4 and CD8, molecules on the surface of T cells that are crucial to immune recognition and response, Vedanta's scientific co-founders have pioneered the current understanding of how the immune system recognizes and responds to microbes.

Recent work from Kenya Honda, Dan Littman, Brett Finlay, Ruslan Medzhitov, and Alexander Rudensky, has led to the realization that gut microbes are required for stimulation of a range of immune responses, including among others, making Th17 and regulatory T cells (Tregs), and thus are potentially useful as immunotherapies. Our co-founders' peer-reviewed and independently reproduced discoveries are the scientific foundation of our programs.

How Our Discovery & Development Platform Works

Translational Medicine

In partnership with our network of clinical collaborators, we generate human datasets from interventional studies where the microbiome is being manipulated, and identify useful associations between bacterial engraftment and clinical response.

Proprietary Strain Library

Our team has generated one of the largest, most diverse, culture collections of gut commensal bacteria in the World. We obtain gut bacteria from healthy, well-validated subjects from across the Globe, and characterize them to ensure that the strains are safe.

Elucidation of Host Response

Banked strains are rationally prioritized according to pharmacologically relevant properties, such as their ability to induce different types of immune responses. View publications for more information.

Medicinal Ecology

We use proprietary bioinformatic tools and mathematical modeling to understand how to optimally assemble strains into consortia. Much like medicinal chemists study how chemical structure affects drug activity, we are pioneering medicinal ecology tools to understand how changes in bacterial consortia structure affect activity.